AutoTrader.com, the internet's leading automotive marketplace, has chosen Continuous Application Performance Management from dynaTrace software, the innovator and emerging leader in application performance management, to optimise performance across their application lifecycle, including 24x7 in their production environment that serves more than 15 million unique users monthly.

Our business depends on the reliability of our applications, and maintaining quality is key, said Cliff Goolsby, AutoTrader's senior director for IT operations and services.

The best way we've found to do this is through consistent visibility into the app, all through the delivery lifecycle and into production. That way we can resolve issues before cost becomes prohibitive and ensure the online experience our customers expect.

We chose to extend dynaTrace into 24x7 production use because it gave us the greatest detail at the lowest overhead, said Brian Gill, AutoTrader's manager for operations technology.

In some cases other vendors didn't even provide capabilities that dynaTrace provides, so it was superior in many ways.

Employing ultra-lightweight dynaTrace agents throughout its production, test centre and development environments, AutoTrader uses dynaTrace's PurePath Technology to proactively spot performance issues in production before they become larger problems, as well as find them earlier in the lifecycle – minimising costs and ensuring the highest level of performance in AutoTrader's various sites.

dynaTrace gives us really deep coverage, hundreds of methods, at well below 5% of overhead – so low, in fact, we hardly notice it, said Mr Gill. But what's really nice is we can go much deeper on the fly to investigate tougher issues without any restart. It's vital to be able to view outlier transactions at that kind of depth to quickly determine root cause.

dynaTrace's ability to trace individual transactions across all logical and physical tiers was exactly what AutoTrader needed to manage performance across the lifecycle, particularly in their production environment.

With multi-tier complexity growing in J2EE applications and architectures, such a solution is a must-have, said Mr Gill. dynaTrace is a necessity for a complex environment like ours.

When you go to a doctor, you may have no idea where a symptom is coming from or why, and without something like an MRI, they often can't find the cause. dynaTrace is like an MRI – a full-body, high-res scan for mission-critical applications.

On Thursday 24 September at noon ET, Mr Gill and other experts from AutoTrader.com and dynaTrace will discuss AutoTrader's success in an in-depth webinar. Registration is open, click here.

Latest Products

dynaTrace Development Edition enables development teams to isolate and address performance issues during the development phase itself, in integration with commonly used integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse.